The following
statement was issued January 15, by the California Nurses Association (CNA).

The two-day strike at
the giant General Electric corporation took a dreadful turn this morning with
the tragic death of Kjeston Michelle Rodgers, a young single mother of three
who was struck by a police car while she walked the picket line outside a GE
plant in Louisville, KY. What’s happening at GE is a reflection of a general
crisis over healthcare affecting millions of working people.

The unions involved
are performing a valuable service by giving high visibility to the crisis. This
is clearly only the beginning. The spread of health insurance cuts, and the
hikes in out-of-pocket expenses [for workers, imposed by] corporate employers,
is causing real pain and increasing insecurity for families across the country.

This action by union
members at GE is a reflection of the more general healthcare crisis arising
from a healthcare delivery system now dominated by giant corporations and the
skyrocketing cost to keep it going.

Although concerted
efforts are made to conceal the real reason for the escalating costs, there is
no secret as to the root cause of the crisis. Prices are being driven
constantly higher by:

(One) The massive and
unprecedented amount of merger and acquisition activity in the healthcare
industries since 1993, totaling $716 billion.

The total breaks down:

·Pharmaceutical industry—$457 billion

·Hospital industry—$133 billion

·Health maintenance organizations (HMOs)—$77
billion

·Medical instruments and devices—$49 billion

(Two) The
managed-care-driven hospital consolidation [is being] carried out for the
purpose of garnering higher reimbursements. For the country’s two largest
for-profit hospital corporations it has meant:

Tenet
Healthcare—profit for 1999-2001: $1.25 billion

HCA—profit for
1999-2001: $1.7 billion

The figures above
demonstrate why costs are spiraling out of control and who profits from them.
The response of the HMOs and other insurers to these escalating healthcare
costs has been to steadily raise premiums to those employers providing or
contributing to the insurance of employees. This has meant double-digit premium
increases over each of the past two years. This situation is particularly stark
in California, where CalPERS, the second largest purchaser of insurance in the
country, saw premium increases of more than 20 percent.

(Three) Drugs prices
are a primary driver of healthcare cost inflation. The pharmaceutical industry
continues to be the most profitable industry in the country, reaping billions.
Employers have passed the cost along to workers with higher co-pays, less
benefits, tiered programs, or cutting health insurance entirely. This is
combined with an increase in the number of people with no health insurance—now
amounting to about 15 percent of the population. With the economy in recession,
the numbers of uninsured are expected to increase. The uninsured use expensive
emergency rooms for their primary care.

The consequence of
these developments has been that employers like GE have decided to do battle
with their own employees rather that take on the HMOs or confront the drug
companies and their excessive profiteering. This week’s strike at GE and last
year’s 44-day healthcare-related strike by Hershey workers are indications that
the unions representing hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers have decided to
fight back.

Health insurance is
expected to be one of the main issues for contract negotiations involving
autoworkers and members of the Teamsters union this summer. It is a disgrace
that workers, like Kjeston Michelle Rodgers, are forced by their employers to
fight to prevent their health insurance from being stolen from them and their
families. It was because of her concern for the healthcare security of her
family that Kjeston Rodgers was on the picket line at 5 a.m. when she was
slain.

That is the concern of
the 450 nurses, members of the California Nurses Association, who have been on
strike for over a month at Doctors Hospital in San Pablo and Pinole,
California.

Throughout the
country, nurses who have dedicated their lives to delivering compassionate
healthcare find that upon retiring they are uninsured and unable to afford the
care they need. This situation, like the move by corporations like GE to make
it hard for employees to have healthcare security, is a disgrace that needs
urgent attention.

Indeed, our entire
crisis-plagued healthcare system needs reexamination and remedial action. Only
by fundamentally changing the way we finance healthcare will we be able to contain
skyrocketing costs and guarantee healthcare for all. The story of Kjeston
Rodgers, who died in the effort to alter the present course, should be
enshrined in our memory, never to be forgotten.